Monday, February 17, 2014

Guest Post by Curtis Edmonds

I self-published my debut novel,
RAIN
ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, one year ago today, on February 17, 2013. That
was a mistake.

What I meant to do was launch
RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY on March 1. In order to prepare for that date, I
uploaded the Kindle version of RAIN ON MY WEDDING DAY to Amazon on February 17.
I wanted to have a page ready to go on Amazon so that people could pre-order
the book before the release date. Except that I couldn’t figure out how to do
that. (You may not be able to; I’m not sure.) So when you look at the Amazon page for my book, it says it was
published on February 17, not March 1.

That was one of the many
mistakes that I made with RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY. It wasn’t my first mistake,
and it wasn’t the last one. In the past year as a self-publisher, I have made a
lot of mistakes. Some of them have cost me time, and most of them have cost me
money in some way.

I read Joe’s blog, and other
resources, trying to figure out what I needed to do to get my book to market in
the best possible way. I still made mistakes. Most of them were well-meaning, I
think. I like to think I’ve learned from them, and I am hoping not to make those
same mistakes with my next novel.

In this post, I cover four
things I did with RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY that turned out to be mistakes, and
discuss why I am not going to repeat them. (Two quick caveats, though, before I
start. First, these were not all of
the mistakes that I made, only the ones I am comfortable telling you about.
Second, if any of these things sound familiar, but they worked out for you in
your career, that’s fine. I am just talking about what I think I did wrong with
my book.)

MISTAKE NUMBER ONE: I wasted a lot of time before I got RAIN ON YOUR
WEDDING DAY published.

I finished the first draft of
RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY in March of 2011, about two years before I
self-published it. I recognized right away that the book needed some work, so I
hired a copy editor. Around the same time, I hired another freelance editor
that I knew to take a look at it as well. It ended up that I was doing two
rounds of revisions on the novel from two different editors at the same time.
This was not a good idea.

After I got the novel into
shape, I started querying on it. I did my querying slowly, taking my time,
researching possible agents. I found an agent early on who asked to see the
full manuscript, and I stopped querying at that point. She ended up passing on
the book. After that, I went to a writer’s conference in New York, met with
some agents, and decided that the novel needed more work. I spent the winter of
2011-12 on revisions, and then started querying again. I got a couple of
nibbles from other agents, but they passed on it as well.

I eventually hired a
developmental editor to help me polish the book. He worked on a couple of
chapters, and then decided that he didn’t have time to finish, and refunded my
money. So I hired another developmental editor who helped me out a great deal.
Once I worked through those revisions, I started querying again in the fall of
2012. Again, a couple of agents looked at the full manuscript, but none of them
decided to represent me.

I decided to self-publish in
January 2013. I hired a cover designer who put out what I still think is a
great cover. I hired someone to format the book for me. Six weeks later, RAIN
ON YOUR WEDDING DAY made its debut to an indifferent world.

I made three rather large
mistakes here. First, I wasted a lot of time and effort hiring all these
different editors. I think I got my money’s worth out of all of them, but the
entire editing and revision process ended up taking a lot longer than it needed
to. Second, I drizzled out the query process for far too long. I basically
stopped querying whenever I got a request for a full manuscript. This was not a
good idea. And finally, since I was spending all my time on revisions and
querying, I wasn’t writing anything else. I didn’t start on my next book until
last summer, and I only finished the first draft in January 2014.

What I’ve learned: Once I get my first draft polished, I am going
to hire one editor, and then query to see if I can interest an agent, and if
that doesn’t work, I am going to try to get the book ready for publication as
quickly as may be. But not too quickly. Why?

MISTAKE NUMBER TWO: I got RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY published much too
quickly.

And yes, before you say
anything, before you say one single word,
I recognize that this mistake cuts against the previous mistake. I get that.
Really. Here’s the thing. Once I decided to self-publish--that is to say, once
I realized that the very last lingering opportunities to get my book
traditionally-published had burned away--I did it in kind of a big rush. I got
the cover designed and the book professionally formatted and did everything I
could to make the book presentable and desirable. And then I got a little
impatient. I put the book up on Amazon without doing anything much to promote
it ahead of time. I did a cover reveal on Twitter and mentioned it on Facebook
but otherwise didn’t let anyone outside of my social media following know that
the book was coming out.

This was a mistake, and it
showed up in early sales. By which I mean there weren’t any sales, or not very
many, not at first. Since there weren’t any sales, there weren’t any reviews,
so the few people who looked at the Amazon site didn’t know if the book was any
good or not. Not to mention BookBub (just to name one example) requires a
minimum number of reviews before you can use their service.

Over the last year, over a
hundred people have reviewed RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY on Amazon, and more than
half of them gave the book five stars. But it would have been helpful to have
at least some of those reviews in place before I launched the book.

What I’ve learned: This time, I am going to contact the
book-bloggers that have reviewed RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY and let them know
that the new book is out, and contact some additional bloggers as well. I am
probably going to try to build buzz on Goodreads through a giveaway. I am going
to have at least some kind of plan in place for marketing, which I didn’t have
at all for RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY.

MISTAKE NUMBER THREE: I didn’t put RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY in the
appropriate category on Amazon.

This makes me sound slightly
more stupid than I actually am, so let me tell you a little about my novel,
first. RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING day is the story of Will Morse, a former NFL player
who has had three of his four children die. Will is estranged from his fourth
child, who seeks to reconnect with him on the eve of her wedding. He is wracked
with pain and anguish and guilt, and spends most of the story in an isolated cabin
in North Georgia, brooding over his losses. It is--and I say this as the
author, and an advocate for the novel--a bit of a downer.

When I tried to pitch RAIN ON
YOUR WEDDING DAY to agents, I had the idea that it was in the genre of upscale
commercial fiction, like The Kite Runner
or something. You could call it “book club fiction” if you wanted to. The only
problem is that when you list a book on Amazon, you can’t list it under the
category of “upscale commercial fiction,” because it isn’t there.

I listed RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING
DAY as women’s fiction. I did this because I hoped that women would buy it.
(This seems to have been a good decision--the people who have the book listed
as “to-read” on Amazon are overwhelmingly female.) I also listed the book as
literary fiction, even though it really isn’t, because I liked the idea of
being a literary fiction writer a lot better than I liked being a women’s
fiction writer. And in the description, I said that the book was a “modern
Southern gothic” novel, which I guess could be a genre if there were other
books in that genre, but I don’t think that there are.

What I learned: My next novel will be listed firmly within a
recognized genre that is going to help me sell books. That gets me into the
next mistake.

MISTAKE NUMBER FOUR: Since I didn’t realize what genre I was writing, I
didn’t conform to the basic conventions of that genre.

I read my reviews. I treasure
the good ones, and I try to learn from all of them. What I learned was that
some of my readers considered RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY to be a contemporary
romance. I never thought of the book that way. I never queried it as a romance
novel. I would not have ever imagined myself writing a romance novel. And here
I am, and people are calling the novel I spent years on a “romance novel,” and
I am sort of, well, not horrified by that. (Whatever you think of the
“contemporary romance” genre, it sells more books than “modern Southern gothic”
does.)

The other thing that some of my
reviewers were telling me was that they don’t usually read books by male
authors featuring male characters. They’d made an exception in my case, and
they liked my book. But I came to the conclusion that if these reviewers were
somewhat turned off by having a male protagonist in a contemporary romance
novel, there were at least some people out there who didn’t read the novel
because of who I am and who the protagonist is.

I am not criticizing anyone on
their reading habits here. People can read what they want, with whatever
characters that they want. But if I’m in the business of selling romance
novels--and it appears, to my great and unending surprise, that I am in the business of selling romance
novels--then I need to do a better job of managing reader expectations.

What I learned: The next novel has a female protagonist. It also
means that I am thinking about writing it under a female pen name. I cannot
tell you how thrilled I am about this, but if it helps me sell more books, I
have to at least consider it.

RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY has
not, so far, been a success. I have not quite made back the financial
investment I have put into the book, and there is every possibility that I
won’t. I have given away far more copies than I have sold. If the information
in most surveys is correct, I have probably sold about an average number of
copies for a self-published novel, which of course is not very many.

I am not happy about this. I am
glad that I chose self-publishing over the alternative of leaving RAIN ON YOUR
WEDDING DAY in a drawer somewhere, and I’ve been very gratified by the great
reviews the book has received, but I am unhappy that it didn’t sell as well as
I thought it might.

But it’s only been a year. I
hope to have the next book out before too much longer, and that should help
sales. Maybe I’ll get lucky. All I can do is try to write the best books I can,
and do my best to find an audience, and identify the mistakes I have made so
far and try not to repeat them. I don’t think that’s a formula for success,
necessarily, but maybe it’s a formula for avoiding failure more completely.

Joe sez: I try not to give unsolicited advice when someone guest blogs. If Curtis wanted my opinion, he could have asked for it.

That said, I'll offer some general advice that I believe all new authors can benefit from. If your well-reviewed book isn't selling:

1. Change the cover. You may think you have the greatest cover in the world. And maybe you do. But I've changed covers on some of my titles more than four times. A cover image you like can be greatly enhanced with different font, added blurbs, different framing, etc. If your sales are weak, why settle?

3. Change the product description. Look at bestselling ebooks, and copy the style they use.

4. Change the category and keywords. This should be a no-brainer. Keep tweaking until you notice a boost.

5. Write more. Nuff said.

6. Don't give up. We all make mistakes. The goal is to learn from them and move on, rather than lament what was (or what currently is). Fix it. Change it. Experiment. Tweak. Evolve. Ebooks are forever. Every title has more than one change at success. In fact, it has many, many chances at success.

As I write this, my horror novel TRAPPED is #49 in the Top 100 Bestsellers thanks to a BookBub. It has gotten 570 reviews, averaging 4 stars.

This book was rejected by the Big 5, but it has cracked the Top 100 four or five times, months apart.

Yesterday, RUN by Blake Crouch was in the Top 100. It has hit this list several times. And THE SEX CLUB by LJ Sellers is also in the Top 100... again. I've lost count of how many times I've seen her Detective Jackson Mysteries in the Top 100.

In the old days, when the only way to reach readers was by tattooing ink onto dead trees, 99% of books sold best shortly after they were released. Then, if the author was lucky, sales would gradually trickle down to the point where it was regularly stocked on a bookstore shelf. If the author was unlucky, the book wasn't stocked anymore and went out of print. If they were REALLY unlucky, the book wasn't stocked anymore, but the publisher claimed it was still in print because the ebook was still available, and the rights never reverted.

These days, you can make a big splash during a book launch, but that isn't the only splash your book can make. Sales look less like a long tail, and more like a heart monitor, spiking every so often.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. A lot can happen during eternity. In fact, EVERYTHING you think of can happen when infinity comes into play.

The trick is to be alive to see it happen to your books. And you can improve your odds by heeding my advice above.

19 comments:

I am not a romance reader of any sort, but I've got to say I LOVE your book cover. Even though I don't read romance I find it intriguing. Well done. I think it's picture perfect.

Thank you for sharing your experiences too. It'll help me avoid making some of the same mistakes as I go indie.

I do think that the most critical element is just to do as Joe suggests: Write. Publish. Repeat (also the name of an excellent book on being an indie author I've read). The more you grow your backlist the more growth you'll experience as readers discover one book by you and go looking for others. It's like TV series: people are loathe to invest in a series which was canceled after one season. It's the same thing with an author. I'm sure I'm not alone in specifically looking for new books by authors with more than one title available. So keep it up! Keep writing. Keep publishing. And please continue to share what you learn.

I've read hundreds and hundreds of romance novels, and that cover doesn't say romance, although the term "wedding day" will catch a romance reader's eye.

I actually like the idea behind the cover, and the red umbrella stands out, but the font/lettering is not working for me, is just rather weak.

And I don't know the ending of your tale, but if the novel has a tragic ending, it is not romance. Romance readers expect a happy ending--the couple is together, major issues resolved, hope for the future. So, this cover needs more hope if the ending is happy (like more blue sky peeking from the heavy clouds. :)

Romance readers, btw, are sorta of trained by the industry to decipher what a novel is like (which subgenre of romance, what level of steaminess or sweetness) from the cover. If people are fully clothed, not really touching or not much, and there's a discreet feel, it's gonna be sweet. If they are dressed in period wear, historical. If there is a prairie or horses, cowboy or ranch or frontier. If there is a half-nekked man or woman, sexier. If the guy is barechested and tattooed and there's something glowing or amuletty, it's paranormal and hot. IF there's a church or a word like "blessed" or "miracle" or "faith" or "grace", then it's a spiritual/religious romance. Many who read romance have favorite niches in the genre--fantasy or Regency or contemporary or romantic suspense. So, the cover matters a lot to help fans find their subgenres fast.

I think it's valuable to hear about mistakes and missteps and oopsies. Thank you so much for telling your story. It may keep some of us looking to self-pub in the future from making these mistakes. We'll surely make others, but not these. :D

Curtis, love your cover. I've read thousands of romance novels in my life and I write them. Although yours does not sound like a romance from the description, it does sound very poignant and meaningful. May have to give it a try. Good luck with the next one, hope you keep your name so the happy readers can find the first one.

If the guy is barechested and tattooed and there's something glowing or amuletty, it's paranormal and hot.

I don't know why, but that sentence cracked me up.

Thanks for sharing your experience, Curtis. I'm going to echo some of the others that your cover is very attractive, but possibly might not be the most appropriate for romance (but what do I know, I don't read that genre) and the fonts seem a tad off somehow.

That said, at least in terms of professionalism and attractiveness, that cover reflects artfulness and polish to me.

Best of luck going forward. It's true what everyone says about continuing to write—which is what I intend to do as well, with only one novel out so far.

You have to remember, when I wrote the book, I was NOT thinking, AT ALL, that it was a "romance" novel. The thought never occurred to me. (And the main character is in his sixties; you don't want to see what he looks like with his shirt off.)

I don't normally read guest posts on this blog, but I was so attracted to your novel cover I just had to take a peak.

Firstly, more on your cover. I don't normally like photo covers but this one is gorgeous in its stunning simplicity.

Second, I've been self-publishing for three years and have used many different pen names for the different genres I write in.

In the end I put all of my books together under my real name. To me, your mistakes don't seem like mistakes at all. Also, I don't see how people have seen this book as a romance. It doesn't appear that way to me.

I think you should keep publishing what you love to write under one name, the same name. Don't conform to public demand or you won't stand out as having created something new.

Just saying. It's early days for us both yet. Keep at it and publish as soon as you can.

Thanks for telling us your story. I know of what you speak, having made a few doozies in my time. :)

The story of this new world of self-publishing is still being written and while blogs like Joe's and Hugh's help new self-published authors maneuver this world, there are still many ways we can make mistakes. I read a meme recently that said if you aren't making mistakes, you aren't trying to do difficult and important things.

So while making mistakes can hurt at times (heck, most of the time!), be happy with your mistakes. You're taking risks and learning. Most people never do take those risks so you are miles ahead of them!

Thanks for shout-out, Joe! Back in 2010, I looked at what you were doing (and sharing on this blog) and thought I should be able to make money selling mysteries on Kindle too. Best decision I ever made. Thanks for the continuous inspiration.

Takes balls to demonstrate what didn't work for you in a forum like this. Here is a suggestion--do the editing, the cover, the rest of the stuff yourself for free. You are smart enough to write it, you are smart enough to edit it--just put a little time between the two functions. Use kindle's cover creator and public domain illos and play with this until you get some facility with the program. Make your motto "If it's free, it's for me." Let your book self finance. Don't pay up front. Anyway, learn and earn and good publishing future to you.

About the cover: The cursive font on the bottom doesn't work for me at all. I see others have said the same thing. I don't read your sort of fiction much, so maybe having hard to read covers is part of your genre.